Philip Burke - Table of Contents Burchfield Penney Art Center - Table of Contents
2015
Exhibit:
Philip Burke: "The Likeness of Being" - A Sampling
On
display at the Burchfield
Penney
Art Center at Buffalo State College
1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY
April 10-September 13, 2015
Burchfield
Penney Art Center
- Official Home Page
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Partial
Reprint
Burchfield
Penney Art Center (online
October 2022) Philip
Burke
(b. 1956) Philip Burke is an American illustrator born in Tonawanda, N.Y.
in 1956. By the age of 15, as a student at Calasanctius
Preparatory School, he
was doodling and beginning to draw. As he puts it, “When I
was a teen, I wanted
to be a rock star, but I couldn’t play any instruments and
I was too shy to
sing. So, I put my dream into painting and drawing rock
stars.” [1] In 1974,
while attending the University of Toronto, he contributed
caricatures to the
student paper. Though he had no formal art training, his
early influences
included David
Levine and Ralph
Steadman. After two years of college, Burke
relocated to New York
City, where he soon started drawing illustrations for the Village Voice and
other
publications. By 1982 he had transitioned from pen and ink
to oil paints
and working on a large scale. A multi-year exclusive
contract with Vanity
Fair enabled
the artist to return home to
Buffalo, where he married and started a family. In successive years, Burke became a featured artist at
Rolling Stone (1989-96)
and his work appeared in
such publications as Time, Newsweek,
the New
Yorker, GQ, Sports
Illustrated, the New
York Times, and Slate,
among many others. His artwork has
been seen in several books, including The
Savage Mirror (1993)
and Rolling
Stone: The Illustrated Portraits (2000),
and in a touring Rock &
Roll Hall of Fame exhibition. Burke is best known for
portraits of musicians
and politicians. His primary subject is the human figure,
its features warped
and exaggerated and its surface saturated with intense
expressionist color to
suggest complex psychological states. On several
occasions, the artist
has staged “live paintings” in which he creates new works
or embellishes
existing canvases in front of an audience.
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